Review : The African rift

THE study of human ancestry and evolution is, always has been, andif Martin Pickford's book is any guidewill continue to be, a highly emotive subject. There is always the potential for global media attention for new finds with fame and fortune for the "finder". Success breeds success by attracting more funds for the expensive, labour intensive and time-consuming business of searching for our ancestors' fossil remains.

The venture has many of the ingredients of a good detective story: the painstaking search for evidence, the problems of its interpretation, the question of who gets to see the evidence and the final public confrontation in court. The main problem is that the fossil evidence of human ancestry is rare and very fragmentary. Consequently, reconstructing an evolutionary picture is a bit like trying to put together a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. The size is unknown, the few surviving pieces are tornand there is no ...

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